In Meiro Koizumi's three-channel video installation, The Angels of Testimony (2019), the central frame features an interview with Hajime Kondo about his time as a solider of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The conversation centres on war crimes perpetrated in China, including the beheading of Chinese prisoners for...

Diana Campbell Betancourt is a curator working predominantly across South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013 she has been the founding artistic director of the Samdani Art Foundation and chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a transnational art event that has grown in size and scale ever since its first edition in 2012. Backed by...

China, home to 802 million internet users, is subject to sophisticated online censorship. This shrouded state of affairs, unsurprisingly perhaps, serves to reinforce stereotypes around conformity elsewhere. Any realm, digital or otherwise, subject to such strict scrutiny must necessarily be bland and uncritical, right? I was mulling over such...

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Graduated from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Daniel Arsham received the Gelman Trust Fellowship in 2003. Architecture is a prevalent subject throughout his work; environments with eroded walls and stairs going nowhere, landscapes where nature overrides structures, and a general sense of playfulness within existing architecture. Straddling the line between art, architecture and performance, Arsham makes architecture do things it is not supposed to do, mining everyday experience for opportunities to confuse and confound our expectations of space and form.

Arsham was commissioned to create the set design for Merce Cunningham Dance Company for performances in Australia, France, and multiple locations in the United States. Arshamʼs first stage design for Cunningham was acquired by The Walker Museum for its permanent collection. His work has been shown at PS1 in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, The Athens Biennial in Athens, Greece, The New Museum In New York, Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, California and Carré dʼArt de Nîmes, France among others.

Perrotin New York is pleased to present 3018, an exhibition of new work by Daniel Arsham. This is his fifteenth exhibition with Perrotin since joining the gallery in 2005. Though the exhibition contains pieces never before seen in New York, visitors will recognise strains of previous works by Arsham, as signature forms and strategies recur, unifying Arsham’s involvement in different discipline—sculpture, architecture, film, performance—into a total ouvre. 3018 continues Arsham’s dystopian vision of the future, one in which culture as we know it today is eroded, and the objects of modern life have fallen into aestheticised obsolescence.

The ground floor of the gallery is transformed into a provisional garage, as two storied cars occupy the space: a 1981 Delorean, reminiscent of Back to the Future’s (1985) essential prop, and a 1961 Ferrari 250GT California that visitors will recall from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). The cars are instantly recognisable for their pop cultural import, though Arsham has rendered them in crystal, as if an ashy veil had fallen over this museum for film memorabilia. The cars are in a state of decay and portions of the shell have eroded away revealing a mineral core underneath. Volcanic ash, pyrite crystal, selenite, and quartz have sprouted where the mechanical components used to be.

An interest in materials—synthetic and natural, manmade and geological—pervades all the work on view, and with 3018, Arsham remains committed to his signature gesture: transposition. He casts common objects in geological materials that render them as obsolete as they are recognisable, thus highlighting their iconic status. A cast of characters recognisable from childhood cartoons appear as oversized, cast iron-on patches, mementos from the artist’s youth, now calcified. Formerly pliable, they’ve transubstantiated into hardened forms. Some have cracked to reveal the mineral growths that seem to have overtaken many of Arsham’s artifacts.

The now rigid status of these objects is only evident to the touch, not the eye; They are cast meticulously, the bers of the embroidery captured in the material. This haptic quality only accentuates the confusion of materials that seems to animate much of Arsham’s work, his imperative to 'make one material look like another.' That which we know to be soft is hard, that which was once stable is now mutable.

Wrapped sculptures, newer to Arsham’s vocabulary of forms, exemplify this material alchemy. The folds in the fabric have hardened in place, resembling the wet drapery technique on an ancient greek statuary, an effort to capture in stone the diaphanousness of fabric. Arsham’s model is Man Ray’s The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (1920), swapping out the famous sewing machine for recognisable cartoon characters. Pop cultural icons that feature prominently in the American imaginary are palpable but not seeable in this disquieting double play of identification and concealment.

Arsham’s frozen drapery has precedent in his architectural interventions, installations in which figures appear to emerge from the wall leaving hardened draped fabric in their wake. Here, the word ‘FUTURE,’ redolent with connotations of both promise and menace, presses through the surface of the wall and threatens to compromise its structural integrity. FUTURE (2018) acts alternately as a harbinger of the cataclysm has befallen these fond objects of the recent past, or as a signpost for some saving grace ahead.

Daniel Arsham arrives in Hong Kong from New York in time to enjoy the last four hours of his birthday, although with his new show, Fictional Archeology, about to open at Galerie Perrotin in Hong Kong, there is little time for celebration. In fact, with exhibitions on three different continents in the next month, he may have to put the...

New York City is a mecca for contemporary art enthusiasts. Littered with the city's top-tier establishments, Chelsea and the Lower East Side are traditional Thursday night haunts for New York's artistic elite. Bold, intelligent and glamourous, the

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